


20/20

by rollingplains



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-19
Updated: 2013-07-19
Packaged: 2017-12-20 15:56:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/889111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rollingplains/pseuds/rollingplains
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>as in, hindsight is.<br/>(or: it doesn't take long for her to realize he saw way more of her in the drift than she did of him)</p>
            </blockquote>





	20/20

**Author's Note:**

> SO- this is my headcanon for how drifting works. Don’t get me wrong: I love the mind-reading trope. It is GREAT. But I can’t get down with the idea that anyone would willingly sign up to completely mash brains with another person. I’m as vanilla as it gets (although I do write fic, so maybe I’m not as normal as I think), and yet still there are some things that ain’t nobody needs to know I think about.
> 
> Anyway, this is not say I don't love me some full brain sharing fics. I am all over it. When someone else writes it.

She could hardly be faulted for not noticing earlier, that the images from his mind were dim and fuzzy, in comparison to hers, loud, vivid, and jarring.

Her first time had been a clusterfuck anyway.

And in hindsight, the second time, in the midst of all the chaos and carnage, she realized she had managed to dial down the intensity of her own thoughts but his were no more clear, things she could access if she had the time and inclination, except she had neither, snippets of memories and half formed ideas shrouded in a light fog behind the panic and adrenaline.

It doesn't take much time after that for the pieces to fall into place. The parts left out by the textbooks and scientific articles she had pored over for nights, why sons didn't mind drifting with fathers, wives with husbands, and brothers with each other, something she had wondered about for years (wasn't there anything they wanted to hide?).

Until then, she assumed that impending apocalypse (now cancelled) had made such concerns frivolous and irrelevant to the people involved.

She had only been half right.

"You never told me," she grumbles at him one day, not bothering to explain. What didn't he know about her at this point anyway?

"Told you what?" His look of confusion was a nice touch, she thought to herself and she makes a face at him to say _as if you don't know_.

"That total mind meld during drift was only a theory."

She can see the moment when it clicks for him. "They never put you in the simulator," he says. "A couple rounds in that and you start to figure it out."

"Figure out what?" she asks, impatient. After all, he didn't give _her_ a free pass in his brain.

He shrugs. "How to control your thoughts."

She's too practical to be completely mortified (a total invasion of her privacy was a small price to pay for the continued existence of the planet as they knew it...right?) but still, she doesn't appreciate finding out about this after the fact.

"None of the papers ever said..."

"They're not wrong. The potential is there," he muses. "It's tapping into someone else's head. If you know what to look for, you can find it. But really, all you can get to if you're not trying is a little more than what's on their mind at the time."

She's relieved. "Were you trying?"

"Didn't exactly have the time," he says.

"Did you see anything interesting?" she asks, but the question seems rhetorical as soon as it leaves her lips, and a quick look at his face confirms her suspicions. She remembers it: a wisp of a thought during their second drift, that perhaps the last time she had been so nervous was when she was 17 and sitting in a tattoo parlour, staring at the needle an inch from her skin and wondering how clean it was. She had to fight her immediate impulse to groan and cover her face. "I still regret that. It was stupid." Pentecost had been away for 3 weeks at the time and she had been feeling a bit defiant. She had hated it from the day she got it and took pains to keep it covered.

He's amused by her reaction. "Did you forge your permission slip?"

She scoffs. " If you go to the right place, you don't need permission."

"Did Stacker ever find out?" When she shakes her head, his look turns sly. "Where is it? What is it of?"

If he thought she was going to tell him, he was delusional. He had his chance. "If you don't know, I'm not telling you."

A few weeks later, when he's tired of her half-hearted sparring, he says: "a leaf, left leg, just below the hip."

She tosses her staff to the side and tackles him in response.


End file.
